Top 100 Sebastian Faulks Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.”

— Sebastian Faulks

52. “He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.”

— Sebastian Faulks

53. “There had always seemed to me a frightening amount of chance in the way that people chose their careers.”

— Sebastian Faulks

54. “We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don’t know what I’m doing.”

— Sebastian Faulks

55. “It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.”

— Sebastian Faulks

56. “I don’t know your life history, but I think children need to believe in powers outside themselves. That’s why they read books about witches and wizards and God knows what. There is a human need for that which childhood normally exhausts. But if a child’s world is broken up by too much reality, that need goes underground.”

— Sebastian Faulks

57. “In God’s name, she thought, let the more loving one be someone else; for me it is beyond endurance.”

— Sebastian Faulks

58. “Now I see my children and I know that they are figures in a lantern show, that their sense of permanence is an illusion, because all around us time is unstoppable.”

— Sebastian Faulks

59. “If you have only one life, you cant altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?”

— Sebastian Faulks

60. “How do you ‘clear’ your thoughts? You have only other thoughts with which to do the job; ‘thoughts’, therefore, are both blockage and broom. I suppose what we mean is that we should stop reasoning and try to ‘feel’ – which presumes that what we ‘feel’ is more valuable than anything we think...”

— Sebastian Faulks

61. “The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.”

— Sebastian Faulks

62. “Her life had reached an age at which she should no longer be the last to die; there ought to be someone younger than her, a generation of her children who should now be enjoying that luxurious safety of knowing that grandparents and parents still lay like a barrier between them and their mortality.”

— Sebastian Faulks

63. “Gray looked at him. “If I die, Wraysford, and you are still alive, I want you to take charge of the company.” “Me? Why not Harrington?” “Because you are a mad, cold-hearted devil and that is what we are going to need.”

— Sebastian Faulks

64. “It’s only after the change is fully formed that you can see what’s happened.”

— Sebastian Faulks

65. “I’d become more adept at being with other people; I’d lowered my expectations of them and learned to let my mind drift into neutral when they spoke.”

— Sebastian Faulks

66. “I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating.”

— Sebastian Faulks

67. “He tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes.”

— Sebastian Faulks

68. “The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.”

— Sebastian Faulks

69. “Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.”

— Sebastian Faulks

70. “I don’t find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.”

— Sebastian Faulks

71. “But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.”

— Sebastian Faulks

72. “The physical shock took away the pain of being.”

— Sebastian Faulks

73. “Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.”

— Sebastian Faulks

74. “I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn’t have achieved anything.”

— Sebastian Faulks

75. “Lonely’s like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.”

— Sebastian Faulks

76. “Busy is good, isn’t it? Busy means we’re hard at it, achieving our ends or “goals.” Haven’t had time to stop, or look around or think. That’s considered the sign of a life well lived. Although people complain of it – another year gone, where did that one go? – tacitly, they’re proud. Otherwise they wouldn’t do it: you put your time where your priority is.”

— Sebastian Faulks

77. “One thing I had learned from medicine, however, was that denial was often a good strategy; it could buy time for wounds to heal themselves.”

— Sebastian Faulks

78. “You can’t recall someone whose name has worn away.”

— Sebastian Faulks

79. “If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand – and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what – eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?”

— Sebastian Faulks

80. “There is only one life; it is therefore perfect.”

— Sebastian Faulks

81. “But I can hardly remember what it felt like. It’s like everything that happens to you. It doesn’t feel real.”

— Sebastian Faulks

82. “If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began.”

— Sebastian Faulks

83. “We have lived too closely, been through too much. I will not leave you. I cannot, any more than I can leave myself.”

— Sebastian Faulks

84. “A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.”

— Sebastian Faulks

85. “Yet on the dusky veranda she had seemed like a force of nature that had somehow sought out the landscape of his longing and moulded itself to each contour.”

— Sebastian Faulks

86. “Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?”

— Sebastian Faulks

87. “One day, when you are grown up, you suddenly become aware that something has gone.”

— Sebastian Faulks

88. “Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.”

— Sebastian Faulks

89. “At other times I sit and wait. If nothing comes, I’ve discovered that it’s better just to write something – anything. You can always tear up the piece of paper and throw it away. But if you don’t begin, then nothing comes. You have to submit.”

— Sebastian Faulks

90. “He wanted also to be forgiven for all he had done; he longed for the unity of the world’s creation to melt his sins and anger, because his soul was joined to it. His body shook with the passion of the love that had found him, from which he had been exiled in the blood and the flesh of long killing.”

— Sebastian Faulks

91. “The deeper into the sensation she went, beneath his weight and his urging, the more it was like going into a room of utter darkness, which she felt was familiar from a time before her birth; it was something other, or beyond; it was like death, or very near it.”

— Sebastian Faulks

92. “I do not know what I have done to live in this existence. I do not know what any of us did to tilt the world into this unnatural orbit. We came here only for a few months. No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them. We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.”

— Sebastian Faulks

93. “He thought of the sands at Deauville and he felt weary, as though he had heard the first call of middle-age, inviting him to subside into comfortable self-mockery, recognise the embrace of defeat and to indulge his own – after all, only human – failings.”

— Sebastian Faulks

94. “Nothing should ever really surprise us because people are like icebergs, you only see the little bit on the top.”

— Sebastian Faulks

95. “The truer urge she had was to provide for him what his life had lacked; there was an area of experience, of laughter and domestic pleasure, which was apparently unknown to him; and the shape of that absence seemed to be the shape of her own self.”

— Sebastian Faulks

96. “Maintaining his solitude... ‘I’d rather be abandoned than engulfed.”

— Sebastian Faulks

97. “People wonder why you choose certain subjects to write about. The truth is: you don’t really. They choose you.”

— Sebastian Faulks

98. “In Frank I have found something beyond me, beyond my understanding, this is where some incredible core of me is destined to be even if not in this life.”

— Sebastian Faulks

99. “I plunged my head under the water voluntarily... the physical shock took away the pain of being.”

— Sebastian Faulks

100. “British and French patriotism are completely different emotions. Ours is a bit shamefaced and populist, theirs is the province of the intellectual.”

— Sebastian Faulks